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Afghan girl arrives in Canada to attend school

Afghan schoolgirl Roya Shams has arrived in Canada with the Star's Paul Watson to pursue her education at Ashbury College in Ottawa.

Roya Shams steps off her flight at Pearson and into her new life. Often during the five months it took to get her here, the mission seemed impossible. (RICHARD LAUTENS / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Roya Shams, foreground, gently wept along with her mother, left, and sister as she bid farewell in a Kandahar cemetery to her father, a police commander killed by the Taliban in July. (PAUL WATSON / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Roya Shams' father Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, 57, commanded Afghan police in Kandahar city's District One until the Taliban killed him during a July raid. (HANDOUT)

KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN—Kneeling in rocky dirt at her father's graveside, Roya Shams whispered her farewells through the cloth mesh of her burqa's veil.

Roya was packed and ready to fly to Canada to continue her high school education in safety at Ottawa's Ashbury College.

It is one of the country's leading private schools, which prides itself on a progressive and caring learning environment.

And it is Roya's best hope of fulfilling a calling that has made her a vulnerable enemy of the Taliban.

Many times during the five months it took to bring her here, the mission seemed impossible. But, like her father, Roya never surrendered. And now she is free, eager to get to work so that she can honour her hero.

Before she could leave Afghanistan, Roya's thoughts turned to her father, and this daughter of a fallen police colonel, his youngest child, promised him she would return home one day.

It was a solemn commitment she had to make. So many times before, when his children begged that he take the family and abandon their country to save themselves, Roya's father had always insisted they stay and make their stand.

“Your country or a coffin,” he told them, and the words echoed in her mind even as she prepared for a journey halfway around the world.

A police officer since he was a teenager, Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, 57, bravely followed that commitment to his grave, never wavering after insurgents tried to kill him with roadside bombs in 2009 and 2010.

Many times, the Taliban had offered him a way to save his skin: provide them with weapons and information, promise to leave their bomb-making factories and other operations untouched.

“My father said he would never allow them to act freely, and from time to time they tried to target him,” Roya's eldest brother, Dr. Sayed Gulale Shams, told me. “We call it his weakness, or maybe a strength, because he was not willing to do deals with anyone.

“He was a professional and he was always telling us: ‘If I die in any operation, you will never see me shot in the back. I will be shot in the front. And I'm proud of it.'”

The doctor buried his face in his hands and wept.

On July 20, Roya's father was on the trail of Mullah Qahar, a notorious Taliban commander he had hunted long and hard, trying to shut down his relentless network of suicide bombers and death squad assassins.

After an all-night operation, when the sun was up and it seemed the Talib had slipped away again, the District One police commander led a small unit into an ambush.

The mullah shot him with an AK-47 assault rifle. A single bullet pierced the centre of the colonel's forehead.

His men killed Qahar and three insurgents. Their blood spilled into the same dust-blown courtyard where Roya's father fell.

Roya's father gave his life for the same cause that took the lives of 158 Canadian soldiers and wounded thousands more. He spent years preparing Roya to be ready to make the same sacrifice.

Roya's father and mother raised four sons and five daughters. In the Taliban's brutally conservative birthplace, he was expected to keep the females cloistered at home, their virtue protected against a mere glance from an unrelated male.

Instead, under the constant criticism of neighbours or anyone who knew of his liberal ways, Roya's father insisted he saw no difference between any of his nine children.

He raised Roya to continue his fight on a peaceful front, as a politician, hoping her voice could win the victories over extremism and oppression that he had failed to secure with a gun.

The battle Roya inherited began in her father's heart, when Afghanistan was virtually alone in a wilderness of ignorance and bloodletting, long before the world took notice again after Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001.

His conviction that girls and women should be equal to boys and men is not a foreign notion imported by outsiders armed with books and bombs and good intentions.

He had been in this struggle for most of his 57 years, teaching his daughters how to read when he wasn't battling the enemies that came and went with the decades.

She gently wept. The sound mingled with her elder sister Dr. Shogafa Shams' crying, and their mother's desperate wailing

“Don't cry, mother,” the sisters murmured. “Don't cry.”

The women's grief lilted up and across a fetid open sewer running past the cemetery.

Then it was overpowered by the laughter of children playing in garbage and putrid muck, and the clattering drone of three American military choppers that passed nearby.

Soon Roya took flight, through freedom's door, and into Canada.

Even on the good days, when problems were solved, objections removed, and we were moving ahead again, I worried that we would be asking too much of Roya, putting too much pressure on a girl who had suffered so much.

But a short essay she wrote about herself in October, for the Ashbury application, convinced me to keep going. And any time I felt like giving up, I reread her words, lingering on the last paragraph.

Through all of its mistakes in grammar and syntax shouted the powerful voice of a young woman who wants a chance to lead. Damn the dangers.

“A girl going to school in Kandahar is somehow like a hell, but many girls and women are daring and taking that risk,” Roya wrote.

“Every day we were expecting a cruel incident on our way; going to school in Kandahar was a compromise with life either you should be targeted any time, at any level and anywhere or just waiting for any warning from head of family to stop going because of security reasons or threats disseminated.

“Despite of these all challenges, our brave girls have chose to go to schools and be a contributor to state affairs in future.”

The perils were all the more obvious as Cooke and I arrived in Kandahar last week to meet her family, assure them we would take good care of Roya, and then escort her out of Afghanistan.

The day before we landed, a 15-year-old suicide bomber talked his way through several rings of security, reached the door of police chief Abdul Razaq's office, and blew himself up.

Razaq, who took the position after a suicide bomber had killed his predecessor at the same headquarters last April, dispatched his most loyal police to secure the cityin a ruthless crackdown.

The next day, a suicide bomber rammed his car into an armoured vehicle carrying nearby Panjwaii district's Governor Haji Fazluddin Agha, setting off an explosion that killed Agha, two of his sons, two policemen and a passerby.

Panjwaii was one of the main battlefields for Canadian troops, who had eased out a pro-Taliban district chief to put Agha, a close ally of President Hamid Karzai, in power before Canada's last combat forces pulled out in summer.

Most U.S. and other foreign combat forces will be gone by 2014, and many here fear the Taliban and their allies will only get stronger.

If the war escalates or negotiations give the Taliban a share of power, Roya could be forced to make more hard choices as she decides whether a political life in Afghanistan is worth the risks.

That is the road that destiny set her on, one that I crossed purely by accident more than a year ago.

An editor, Dianne Rinehart, had asked me to find an Afghan schoolgirl to follow for years to come so that the Star's readers could watch Afghanistan's future unfold through her eyes.

My search led to the Afghan-Canadian Community Centre, a Kandahar school started by director Ehsanullah Ehsan. I had never heard of it, but an Afghan interpreter thought it was the best place to find the right girl.

“God has sent you!” Ehsan gushed when I told him I was from the Toronto Star. As an atheist, I had my doubts. But as I listened to Ehsan's story, I began to wonder.

Like Roya's father, Ehsan is a rare Afghan man who thinks Afghan women should have the same rights, freedoms and opportunities that he has. Faced with the choice between taking on the seemingly impossible or walking away, he took the harder road.

He started small, teaching girls and women skills such as how to use a computer, start a business or speak English. But as more students arrived, demand stretched Ehsan's means to the limit.

Defying insurgent death threats, running out of cash, he was on the verge of shutting down the school in 2006 when the Star's Mitch Potter walked through the door.

The story Potter wrote caught the eye of Ryan Aldred and his now-wife Andrea Caverly, Ottawa readers who were moved to do something they had never done before.

The couple sent Ehsan some money and urged him to keep going. Then they founded a volunteer charity, the Canadian International Learning Foundation, which raises millions of dollars to educate students and mentor teachers, in parts of the world wracked by war and poverty.

Its Afghan School Project provides crucial support to Ehsan and his students. Its donors helped keep Roya in class at the centre, where she tutored fellow students and tried to find a way into university.

Roya was making progress, participating in leadership training, working to improve her English, helping other Afghan girls and women build their confidence, until the summer morning when she was told her father was dead.

Ehsan emailed me the devastating news the same day.

“We are mourning another death — this time very close,” his email read. “Our Roya Jan's father was killed. Please send prayers to the departed soul.”

I called Roya the next day. I could barely understand a word she got out between anguished, heaving sobs. The man who gave her strength was gone.

I knew what I had to do. But I had never tried to help an Afghan, or anyone else, get into school in Canada before.

The few experienced people I asked for advice told me that as much as Roya deserved safe refuge and a proper education, getting her a visa would be too difficult, if not impossible.

Groping for solutions, I Googled Canadian boarding schools whose curriculum includes English as a second language.

One list included Ashbury College. For a girl who wants to be a politician, Ottawa sounded like the ideal place to learn.

I emailed Ashbury admissions director Kevin Farrell out of the blue on a Sunday, asking if the school would at least consider admitting Roya. He replied immediately that he would do all he could to make it happen.

For the past five months, he has helped knock down one obstacle after another. Without Farrell, Roya never would have made it to Canada.

But he isn't unique. At every barrier, people who knew the best way over or around it stepped forward and gave Roya a leg up.

I didn't have any personal contacts to call. I didn't use any powers of persuasion. I simply asked them to read Roya's story, knowing that if they did, it would be hard for them to say no.

One of the last to say yes, the answer I was warned not to expect, was a Canadian official at the high commission in Islamabad, Pakistan, who approved Roya's visa.

It happened in the final days before Christmas, when I thought any chance of getting Roya to Ashbury for the start of classes in January was lost.

But one more person, whose name we'll probably never know, made the extra effort and unlocked that last door to give Roya an opportunity that may change her life, maybe even the future of a tormented country.

That's a lot of weight to put on a girl's shoulders, perhaps too much. But Roya's demure smile, the way she sometimes looks to the floor out of respect to elders, belies a strong-willed young woman wise beyond her years.

I have seen sparks of her strength several times over the past months, most recently when she refused to bow down to Afghan police trying to bully her in Kandahar airport.

She not only didn't back down, but forgave them.

Not long after we had landed in Toronto, when Roya was still processing how far she has come, she tried to explain to me why she didn't hate the men who wanted to intimidate her. She wanted to understand, not condemn them.

“A single flower does not make a spring,” she said, quoting a Pashto saying, which I took to mean the world needs all kinds.

Faced with something that made me burn with anger, Roya saw past it to a more beautiful, promising world. And I knew that I was listening to a leader.

Paul Watson's stories, photos and videos in the Star and on thestar.com run today and Friday.

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